Korean Comfort Food - Omo Rice

by Sarah J. Gim, Posted Nov 19th 2005 @ 10:03AM

This is your brain on drugs if you're Korean and your drugs just happen to come in the form of small white grains commonly referred to by its street name, "rice."

It's called Omo Rice, a Korean comfort food dish of fried rice covered by or wrapped in a thin egg omelette. It's just a slightly more complicated version of the common Asian confort food of eggs and rice. It is typically served at home, but you might find it on a Korean café menu, along with other typical k-café foods like kimchee dooboo (kimchee with tofu), kimchee bok-keum-bahp (kimchee in fried rice), and that very authentic Korean food, french fries (french fries).

"Omo" refers to the omelette, which makes sense, but I really don't have any idea how the translation got so messed up. It’s a thin omelette made from eggs seasoned with a dash of soy sauce, a dash of sesame oil, and a sprinkle of sesame seeds. Usually, it’s simple fried rice with any assortment of vegetables under the omelette, but you can also make it spicy. Along with the salt, pepper, garlic, soy sauce and sesame oil for seasoning, I add goh-choo-jahng, the same red pepper paste that is added to bibim-bahp.

The funny thing about omo rice is that it usually served with a giant glop of Heinz tomato ketchup right on top of the eggs. Plain old burgers and dogs ketchup. I don’t even like ketchup with French fries, so I left the ketchup off and chose kimchee as my condiment instead.

Filed Under: Ingredients, Methods
Tags: asia, eggs, frying, grains, vegetables

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Reader comments (Page 1 of 1)

11-19-2005 @12:13PM Multi said... I thought omurice was a japanese dish actually. Although my mom was the first person to introduce me to it. She put ketchup in the fried rice as well as on top haha.
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11-20-2005 @3:42AM OL said... I had the pleasure to taste a version of this dish plus tuna/onions/red peppers. small portions of this then had to be wrapped inside marinated nori sheets - simple and unbelievably tasty. I guess that goh-choo-jahng is really the ingredient which makes the difference.
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11-20-2005 @12:35AM K2 said... Yes, Omu-rice (as the Japanese call it) is also very popular in japan, and is covered in Ketchup... Making it a Japanese comfort food, as well as Korean.
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11-25-2005 @3:28PM LySiNe said... First time I ever heard of omu rice was in a dorama of some sort. I can't remember which one. The first time i ate it, my fiance' made it for us at home. She made kim-chee bok-keum-bahp and wrapped it in the omelette. The kids liked ketchup, the adults ate it without. Condiment was chong-gak kim-chee. I've done the seaweed wrap with a white and black rice with black beans mixture and daen-jang che-gae, but not with the omu rice. All in all. Good eats.
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11-20-2005 @4:13AM sarah said... the tuna thing is pretty funny because a lot of korean people i know make another sort of homestyle dish of steamed white rice, canned tuna, soy sauce, and a RAW egg all mixed together.

this ketchup thing kills me. i've never liked ketchup even with french fries, so it just sounds so...um, interesting? to put on rice and eggs. LOL!
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